Company Credit Card Points On My Card

Hi friends. Interesting dilemma here.

Years ago, the company I worked for had a company credit card get shut down. It was shut down because it was tied to a prior executive and they just turned it off. So the team comes running to me in middle management finance that we need a new card as we had vendors that only accepted cards.

I tried opening a corporate card with a few banks but got denied a few times…mainly around banks not looking at EBITDA and just saw big losses and the company was relatively new…went through a transaction PE to PE and so the parent company in the structure was a new entity and banks didn’t like that.

So me being silly in a pinch opened up a business card in my name, with me as the owner under my social, assuming all liability. The card has my name on it and the business name under it.

When I left the organization years ago we did paperwork to move the card owner to the new CFO. We both signed and sent it in and I stopped getting any alerts to my phone on charges so I thought it was taken care of.

Well it wasn’t. I’m working on a mortgage and this card came up with my lender. I had no idea it still was there. We got into the account and they have been still using it diligently and paying each statement balance.

The bank wanted me to close it right away and said this is a huge liability for you. If they don’t pay you’re in the hook. The bank says “by the way, those credit card points are yours you should redeem those before you close the account”.

So I reach out to the old company cause I’m a nice person, tell them the bank wants to close the card asap and give them an fyi it’s going to happen cause it’s holding up my mortgage. They aren’t using the card terribly much anymore but it has considerable points on the account.

The person I spoke to, not the CFO, told me that it was their bad on the card and the CFO admits that they were going back and forth with the bank and ended up forgetting about the situation as the bank had more questions and they never responded. They also said that I could either take the points for myself or send them a check for them - they don’t care. Because I had the log in, they were getting the paper statements and paying the balance by phone all these years and have not attempted to cash in the points cause they aren’t me.

The bank froze the card yesterday and once pending charges clear we will use points to pay the balance off which they agreed to.

On these remaining points….are these technically mine? I am on the fence. On one hand my good deed of helping the company from some hiccups with vendors has paid a dividend, I did not make the charges to earn the points even though they are saying I can take them. While in the bank yesterday we did see that their highest statement balance was 150k - I got sick to my stomach that the liability could have been mine in a worse case scenario.

Thoughts?

Location: Arizona